@69
Maybe they flew in on Cindy M.'s essential small private plane?
Where the "tapped" thing comes from.
I'm sure John McCain would find the idea of physical contact with Sarah Palin highly appealing, but tapping someone is the traditional term for being chosen for secret societies at Yale, especially Skull and Bones. I think it started appearing in the media as a term for being chosen for a high position only after Bush 41.
A.J Luxton @143
The Nineties Yoyodyne Was a Silicon Alley Start-up. The possibility that they issued parking stickers (or had a parking lot in Manhattan) was next-to-zero. More likely your friend is an agent of The Horn.
I still have a yellow Yoyodyne Industries promo baseball cap from some product launch party. Lou Dobbs and the guys at Space.com were tickled by it when we all went to his house shoot off amateur rockets.
During the really, really optimistic part the tech boom (say, like, 1996-8) there were a bunch of avatar and virtual realm development companies who took their names from Neuromancer and Snow Crash. I remember The Ono Sendai Corp and Black Sun Industries. It seemed very Nineties to me that rather than trying to realize SF imagined products, people wanted to envision SF Imagined Companies.
Back Sun eventually changed its name to Blaxxun when it became clear that we weren't going to be building the Metaverse just yet, exactly.
There was also Yoyodyne Industries. But they made simple email games rather than whatever their counterpart made in Buckaroo Banzai.
#11, how will Faux spin this?
Daily Kos has a diary with a screen shot showing Brit Hume and an info graphic stating: Scooter Libbey found NOT GUILTY (of lying to FBI.) No mention of the other four charges...
It's also interesting that Japan is utilizing it's cutie character on location in an area that historically has felt a bit of discomfort with drawn representations of people a la "graven images."
Then again maybe 5-10 years from now Japanese art direction will be swamped by cute interpretations of mathematically complex mosiac patterns...
There's also this:
Maochan, an anime series in which 3 eight year old girls provide the main military defense against evil "cute little aliens" who are targeting Japan. In keeping with Japan's post-WWII goals, only defense is allowed (of course when their commander stands on a balcony with arm extended and cape flowing and yells "Now is the time to defend!" it looks a lot like Napoleon in the Alps...)
My three year old, her two teenage sisters and I are all sort of gaga over it (GREAT bubblegum theme song.)
"I Maochan, promise to defend the peace of Japan with high spirits! (giggle")
Charlie Stross at #120: will do! How often does one get this sort of suggestion from the author? (Well for the convention-going folk here, probably more often than for me.)
I should clarify that I don't think the Laundry is an illegal covert conspiracy. It started this thread in a list of vigilante organizations (manned by smart people we admire) and got batted around into, um, another column. It was it's motion through the discussion that reminded me of Iran/Contra, not the thing itself.
The Laundry at the agency level is slightly constrained by hierarchical accountabily requirements but its individual agents are encouraged, or at least not discouraged, from acting outside the law (of whatever dimension.) The understanding is then like one of those standard espionage “if apprehended we will disavow all knowledge†type thingies. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I’d say that type of disavowal was in the mix during I/C .
The various takes on the Laundry in this thread have brought back memories of Iran/Contra for me. I loved the conceit of agencies and actors outside the law but not outside the state in The Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue. In real life, however, not so much. I was chewing on those memories when I read this description of Glenn Reynolds proposal for dealing the purported Iranian nuclear threat (I'm not linking to Glenn Reynolds.)
Seems like GR and HH have been reading to many comic books too. Or, as Avram suggested, watching too much 24.
Copying masterworks has a different weight and meaning within Chinese artmaking tradition. A narrower field of subject matter and formal approaches were considered appropriate for artists (than in the west) and the same views and compositional structures were revisited again and again for centuries. Originality and self expression were encouraged at the level of the brushstroke and compostional flourish. A student would spend years learning by copying the works of his master and would come into his own later by refining and reinvigorating those same images at the detail level. Many famous and beloved masterworks in this tradition are things westerners might consider “copies†of each other.
I’d like to belive that the wacky translation of the Panini might be the artist asserting his masterly originality at this level.
Maybe guerilla marketing firms do things differently than above-board marketing firms -- but every time I've worked on any project that got within of a whiff of anyone's licenced characters, everyone is required to sign work-for-hire agreements.
If the agency "owns" Stevens and Berdovsky's work, it would seem like they should also own any illegal aspects of that work as well.
Tim Walker-
Textbook acceptances are like presidential primaries: a state's influence is weighted by where they appear on the "calendar." All of the counterbalance states you mention are counter-counterbalanced by Kentucky.
Last year my company created enrichment materials for a middle school science textbook publisher. One part of the package was a set of booklets on the planets of the solar system (Pluto made it in by about 4 months - not sure if it will be shipped with the rest.) The nearly completed proofs were reviewed by a very high-level editor from the publisher, who made one change: in the "Earth' booklet, the world "evolved" (in the context of incipient life) needed to be to replaced with "appeared." She was very apologetic about it, but there was Kentucky to consider...
Looking at the possibility of all of our work never reaching any students over one word, we got her to compromise on "emerged" which at least implies a process...(sigh)
410, 499 and further up-thread.
The musical marriage of Bugs and Elmer is in "Rabbit of Seville." Elmer is hunting Bugs in the California exurbs and accidentally chases him into the Hollywood Bowl, where a performance of The Barber of Seville is about to begin. Bugs takes on the Figaro role to torture Elmer as his "customer." When Elmer recovers enough to fight back, an arms race ensues. It ends abruptly when Bugs stops brandishing weapons and instead holds out flowers, then candy, then an engagement ring. I guess since Bugs does the proposing, he gets to be the man that time. He looks just as ravishing in a tuxedo as any of his best drag outifts.
No marriage in "What's Opera Doc" but there is a pretty impassioned love scene.
The music in Barber of Seville was already funny before Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese got hold of it. It practically has Carl Stallings-type effects built in - they just go along for the ride. The Wagner in "Whats Opera Doc?" on the other hand, is being actively (lovingly) parodied.
Chuck Jones has a substantial body of cartoons that delight in classical music perfromance tropes.
It has long been a dream of mine to see "the Rabbit of Seville" performed live by a real opera company. It would be a bit difficult to stage but the lyrics are priceless (and not really any sillier than the original.)
Excuse me, "decaying in _a_ new way."
My Yale degree made it unfairly easy for me to get my first job as a waitress – a job that compensated me handsomely while I prepared for my first art show. Furthermore, all of that social education and stalking-the-corridors-of-power training ensured that I always offered the correct spoon and gave good wine advice to the young Wall Street Stud-dogs who made up the restaurant’s clientele…
What I found interesting about your exchange with Blickstein is that it’s pretty clear from his responses that he doesn’t understand the real nature of the criticism at all.
Yes the language is always decaying and changing, but this points to the possibility that it is now decaying in new way. His posts are not so much sloppy writing as they are sloppy conversation (college dining hall conversation perhaps) rendered as writing.
The graduate students that I teach don’t seem to make the distinction between spoken and written speech that I was raised on. They live by IM and texting and Powerpoint. It’s all one big soup of communication. They get their point across, but it has more to do with momentum than precision. I thank all of you supporters of the well written word for speaking up.
Any room for Europeans?
His inspiration may have flowed
through archetypes from sleep
But Freud and Jung he surely showed
that ce n'est pas un pipe
Oh, hm, I see - you didn't credit Doyle for that one because of the question mark. Therefore I state:
#11 is Samuel R. Delany.
I'm sorry to see that the pastiche author of #9 didn't do something with "Deliverator", like "Ringbearerator." I almost didn't read past page one of Snow Crash because of that word (very glad I did.)
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